Mighty Bargain Hunter

Bartering with the lawn-mower repair guy

May 29th, 2008 | by mbhunter |

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We’d been having issues with our riding lawn mower for quite some time. Last fall right at the end of the season we broke one of the mower spindles halfway through running over the leaves in our yard. This spring, when we tried to get the mower out to replace the spindle, it wouldn’t start. Big Bird had one wheel in the grave.

The grass was getting long and our daughter was anxious to start playing in the back yard, but with tall grass and a history of critters back there we didn’t want to let her play out there.

We managed to get a guy to come by every two weeks for a pretty reasonable price to mow our lawns. This gave us a little time to assess our options.

We ran across an ad in Craigslist for a guy who would take a lawn mower as payment for the repair of another one. This would be a great deal for us, because we had another riding lawn mower that we bought at auction that didn’t have the mowing deck (a small detail we overlooked). This other mower ran fine but it would cost about $500 in extra parts for us to mow with it.

So we e-mailed the guy and explained what we had, and he said that he could come out and take a look.

Fast forwarding to the end of the story, we solved a number of problems. We now have a lawn mower that works great now, and we gave him the other lawn mower. He did a complete overhaul of the mower, and fixed a lot of little things that weren’t broken but weren’t quite right either. There was no additional out-of-pocket expense from us (except paying someone to mow our lawn for a few weeks). We both were satisfied with the deal.

Chalk one up for bartering!